Day 21

Day was spent painting up the panel beating on the Auto, then reassembling all the front end. It was all going well, the car started first time, now for checking the mechanicals. I had to have the car in a perfect state by 7:30am tomorrow for license checking.

Oh dear, needed two new engine mounts and a pair of steering rack boots. I had one spare but had to buy another - $96!!

Brian helped me with the rear engine mount, a most difficult operation requiring the subframe under the engine to be removed, lot's of jacking, angle grinders and other tools of destruction.

After we'd fixed the engine mount I still had to fit some steering box rubber boots but we needed to move onto the reversing lights as they didn't work.

You may not appreciate this story too much, but I am so impressed with the fix my clever mate Brian got me to do I took a couple of pictures.

Both globes were fine, all fuses were fine. Brian cleverly deduced that there must be a switch on the auto gearbox and set about finding it. He pulled apart a connector and using a little piece of wire, he pretended to be a switch and voila the reversing lights came on. From there we knew we were close to the source of the problem. The connector itself was quite corroded and only after we gazed inside it for a while, did we realise that in fact one of the metal spades had corroded away completely. You can see this on one of the photos. There are supposed to be four lugs in there, but one has all gone.

I was off to buy a new one - it was nearly 4pm by now and the chances of buying such a part were slim. After we had pulled apart the device and found there was an arm that swept across a series of contacts and these tell the car computer what gear has been selected. Brian suggested I drill a hole in the back of the device and solder a wire directly to the contact inside. Then run a wire out bypassing the corroded connector.

So this is what I did, and the device with a wire coming out of it, covered in epoxy glue to seal it up, is the result. Hey presto, it works, and will probably work for a lot longer than the original.